The Skeptical Doctor , an entire blog dedicated to the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, yields this gems from just the past month.
Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr. Anthony Daniels who was a prison doctor and psychiatrist for many years before retiring to France.
On the meaning of his pen name, Daniels said he "chose a name hat sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world."
When Good is Bad
Nowadays, when you ask people how they are, they are as likely to tell you that they are good as that they are well. It is as if you were inquiring after their moral rather than their bodily condition.
Of course, the two have seldom been more closely linked, health, diet and safety having replaced faith, hope and charity as the desiderata of the virtuous life.
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There is an asymmetry in our moral assessment of ourselves: goodness comes from within, badness from without. People, as a general rule, don't ask for an explanation of their good behaviour: only their bad is mysterious to them. In many years of medical practice, no one has ever asked me, "Do you think it could be my childhood that makes me so nice, doctor?"
Destructive Delusions
One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of "recovered memory" of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.
And this dissection of the difference between conservatives and liberals, Pot, Meet Kettle.
Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.
Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.